Gaza's Building Ban Leaves a Dentist Operating Out of a Tent, 11 Months After the Ceasefire

Since the ceasefire took hold in Gaza roughly 11 months ago, the physical rebuilding of the strip has barely started. More than four in five buildings in Gaza City and northern Gaza remain completely destroyed or severely damaged, according to the United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT). Fewer than one in five structures are still usable, and Israel's ban on bringing construction materials into the strip has made repairs nearly impossible, Al Jazeera reported.

That shortage is why Dr. Rizq Sufyan Abo Halima, a 31-year-old dentist, now sees patients in a tent pitched in a Gaza City alleyway. His original clinic, Smile One, was bombed in the early days of the war in 2023. He rebuilt in May 2025 in the al-Nasr neighborhood, only to have that clinic destroyed roughly three months later, weeks before the ceasefire took effect last October, according to Al Jazeera's on-the-ground reporting.

Rent on what's left of Gaza's usable buildings has roughly sextupled. Abo Halima told Al Jazeera he used to pay 500 shekels, about $166 a month, for a full apartment to use as a clinic. Comparable space now runs close to $1,000 a month. He says working from a tent, sterilizing his instruments by hand and paying for a security guard lets him avoid passing that cost to patients who are already choosing tooth extraction over fillings because they can't afford the difference.

Al Jazeera's report on this, syndicated by Yahoo News and several aggregators, documents a straightforward economic and infrastructure problem. The UNOSAT destruction figures are independently verifiable satellite data.

The Word 'Genocidal' Is Doing a Lot of Work

Al Jazeera's report, and the Yahoo News version that carries it verbatim, refers throughout to Israel's "genocidal war." That's an editorial characterization embedded in straight reporting, not a legal finding from any court. Readers should recognize the difference.

Epoch Times columnist David Harsanyi argues the genocide label doesn't hold up to scrutiny. He points to a May 2025 claim by UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher, made on BBC Radio, that 14,000 babies in Gaza would die within 48 hours without aid access. Harsanyi says this misrepresented a UN report actually projecting up to 14,000 malnutrition cases among Gaza's roughly 1 million children over the course of a year, not babies dying within two days.

Harsanyi also cites a UNICEF-led Nutrition SMART Survey that found an acute malnutrition rate of 0.5% in Gaza, which he calls one of the lowest in the region, and notes the U.S.-Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation delivered around 187 million meal equivalents plus supplementary food packs before the ceasefire. He argues that once aid volume and nutrition data are accounted for, the sustained "genocide" framing doesn't match the evidence.

UNOSAT's destruction numbers are hard data showing catastrophic property loss and displacement, and Harsanyi's cited nutrition survey is also real data suggesting mass starvation didn't materialize the way early UN statements warned. The dispute is over which numbers best characterize what happened, and whether "genocide" is the accurate legal and moral term for it. No court ruling establishing genocide is cited in any of these reports, and readers should treat the label as a contested characterization, not a settled fact.

A Separate Fight Over What Gets Covered

Fox News raised a related but distinct point: after a group of masked Israeli settlers attacked an NBC News crew and local Palestinians in the West Bank village of Jalud, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a "criminal act of violence" by "a handful of rioters" and ordered arrests. Israeli security forces confiscated three vehicles and opened an investigation, according to Fox News.

Fox's column argues that incident, while real and indefensible, is now getting sustained global coverage while comparable or worse violence elsewhere, including a humanitarian crisis in Sudan affecting more than 33 million people, gets a fraction of the attention. That's a legitimate question about proportionality in international coverage, not a defense of the settler attack itself, which Netanyahu himself condemned.

What's unresolved on the ground in Gaza is simpler and more immediate than either media argument. As long as Israel's restrictions on construction materials stay in place, dentists, doctors and anyone else needing a functioning building will keep operating out of tents and alleyways, regardless of which side wins the argument over what to call the war that got them there.